Google's new tech is the ultimate Rosetta Stone

Google revealed a bunch of new services yesterday, including voice search for Mandarin Chinese and Japanese; real-time English/Spanish audio translation; location-based search features; and the "Google Goggles" augmented-reality Android app, which lets you search using images rather than words (above).

They're planning to soon provide these services in "all of the world's major languages." Nifty enough if you live in the First World. Potentially life-changing if you're unlucky enough to live in the Third.

See, the world is a scary place when you don't know anything about it. Imagine you grew up as a barely literate subsistence farmer in southern India. Maybe you'd like to use your paltry savings to move to Mumbai to seek a better future; but what do you know about Mumbai, other than vague word of mouth? Fear of the unknown is one of our most powerful and primal fears, and where there are no maps or guidebooks, everything is unknown.

But suppose that when you get to Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji Station you can simply take out your phone, and it will help answer your spoken questions, tell you where you are, and suggest where to go. Suppose your phone can translate your Tamil into Hindi and English, in real-time, when you need to ask a question. Moving to a new city and changing your life won't ever be easy ... but suddenly Mumbai isn't nearly as scary as it used to be.

We can expect today's smartphones to be available for ten per cent of today's price in less than five years. At that price, they'll approach worldwide ubiquity, and the demons of the unknown will be slain forever. A whole generation will grow up never knowing what it is to be lost.

There are downsides. One is that privacy doesn't seem to be a priority. It looks like Google will increasingly be including location in their search requests - and it looks like that location, as well as the search terms, will be sent as plaintext in at least some circumstances. I'm sure the Chinese government will be interested in where searches for "Falun Gong" come from, whether via keyboard or the nifty new voice search; and if that data is plaintext, they'll be able to snoop it with ease.

It's not that Google doesn't care about privacy; it has disabled facial recognition in Google Goggles out of privacy concerns, even though the technology is ready today. But it seems like an afterthought, or like they're worried about stalkers, not oppression - while in authoritarian nations, information privacy can easily be the difference between freedom and imprisonment.

We've spent millennia trying to expand the realm of what is known, but there are still things that we want to stay unknown. Now we're approaching the point at which the latter becomes the larger problem. Interesting times, indeed.

Jon Evans is the author of several international thrillers, including Trail of the Dead and Invisible Armies. He has travelled to more than 70 countries and written about Haiti, Iraq and the Congo for Wired, The Walrus and The Guardian